Newspaper ads in the U.S. are at a 10-year low.  Alan Mutter has a great analysis of how this is actually much worse than it seems.  This chart sums it all up:


On the home front, a new Turkish newspaper just got launched.  The brand new Taraf has been met with a lot of expectations, since there are deep concerns about the independence of Turkish media, with one dominant media company, and a large stake in media, indirectly, by the government.

Taraf has sold 42K on its first day.  A week later, it is reportedly selling around 11K.

Looks like another failure.

By the way, notice the lack of a link for Taraf.  You guessed it:  It does not have a website!!!

Honor Gunday is marking this week with an important observation:  He is getting friend requests from heavy Zurna users and he thinks this is very bad news for Facebook.

Honor is the founder of Zurna, a Turkish social network.  Like many other Turkish social networks, Zurna is home to a group of male users (whom we call Apaches here at Mondus) who tend to be extremely aggressive towards other users especially women.

As Honor analyzes in his two blog posts, Facebook now has over 1 million Turkish users.  Facebook is now the second highest-traffic website in Turkey, and Turkey provides Facebook with 3.8% of its global traffic, as the fourth hightest usage country (after th US, Canada and the UK).  These first 1m or so users aremostly elite Turks.  However, with the site’s enormous popularity, it is now starting to spill outside of this 20% elite population.  Honor goes on:

As it seems so far, Facebook currently has attracted the top 20% of the
population which also speaks English. If Facebook decides to launch a
localized Turkish version of the site, the uneducated 80% will start to
infiltrate the site, especially the men, who come from traditional
hijab-wearing households with oppressed women, will start messaging the
girls with obscene or unacceptable messages, leading to the exodus of
the creme de la creme; with nobody (or no respectable girls) remaining
on the site to message locally, then in the next stage, the Americans
and Europeans will start getting random messages from these Turkish
guys, leading to a linguistic and social armageddon. And that’s when
Facebook becomes like Orkut.

Honor also says that he could observe this phenomenon on Orkut, where once the Brazilians arrived in hordes (incidentally, the word horde comes from the Turkish word "ordu", meaning army), they drove all other traffic away.  There’s a group in Facebook called, "Don’t let Facebook get localized to Turkish", so it seems that some Turkish users are afraid of the same thing.

This will be interesting to watch.  Mondus is the closest thing to a Turkish Facebook, with tight-privacy, high-trust local social networking features. We are keen to see how the Turkish invasion of Facebook develops.

UPDATE: Check out this screenshot recently captured from the Turkey network homepage.  The language
on the wall would make a sailor blush!

Scott points out an important issue:

Madison Avenue needs it pretty simple & dumbed-down. I’m betting Zuckerberg & Co won’t fully get that.

It’s a great point and Scott should know what he’s talking about in this area.

The next question is what happens?  My guess is either Facebook’s growth is faster than the models, or the revenue growth ends up slower.

Now that we are beginning to digest what Open Social is, the natural question on everyone’s mind is what Facebook’s move will be.

Google’s launch strategy was smart to paint Facebook as the dominant incumbent.  I think a smart move at this stage for Facebook could be to decide to play in the Open Social game.

Fun to watch…

I am trying to understand Open Social.  So far, the most useful commentary has fome from Marc Andreessen in these two posts.  Ning is obviously a key supporter of the project but to me, it looks like Open Social somewhat makes Ning redundant.

I will probably understand more as the platform is launched and we see more examples of applications.

Maybe I am losing my abstract comprehension ability :).

It’s the meme that won’t go away!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll go on the record again:  It is not a bubble until the investing public gets involved!

Josh Kopelman has an amusing post on the topic today.  He notes:

We live our lives by routines.  In January, we all make resolutions
for the new year.  In November, we give thanks for the bounty of the
harvest at Thanksgiving.  And for those in the tech industry, in
October we go to the Web 2.0 Conference and try to outdo each other
with our declarations of "Bubble 2.0".

I have been trying hard not to use the phrase "social graph", and replace it with "social network", but it has been difficult as "social network" now describes the websites that help you manage your social graph.

It’s clear that the best such application is Facebook.  At least, it was the first encarnation of Facebook.  More on that to come.

And now that Facebook is a platform, questions about what sort of a platform it is spring to mind.  For me, there have been two persistent questions, and today two friends of mine posted about them, making my job easier.

First, Baris looks at the economics of Facebook apps and comments:

The #1 app, Top Friends has 2.8M active daily users.  Can’t easily tell
how many monetizable pageviews they get per user per day, but even at
this massive usage, it’s hard to see them making more than $1000/day.
That’s $360K/year, again not bad, but not a slam dunk.

So, we know popularity <> earnings, and so far, popularity is the only success metric.  With these apps spreading, Facebook seems to be the only one who wins. Add to this that most of these are apps that spread when Facebook did not limit the number of invites you can send to your friends to 10/day.  To build a freestanding Facebook app doesn’t seem to make sense.  Baris is hinting at the next generation of apps that squeeze additional value out of the social graph, and that may be interesting.

Second, Aydin points out the changing demographics of Facebook:

• Between ’06 and ’07 the proportion of 18 to 24 year olds on Facebook went down from 35% to 25%
• Between ’06 and ’07 the proportion of 35 year old plus segment on Facebook went up from 35% to 46%

Facebook has been used a certain way by its first gen inhabitants, who were defined by certain characteristics (see danah boyd’s excellent study on this).  They were what made Facebook very very different.  The next wave (post-September 06) flocked because of these differences. We will see if they change Facebook.  My bet is that they will.

Emre Sokullu, the founder of Grou.ps had developed a collaborative utility, UnDisposable, to keep his userbase records clean in Grou.ps.  It has now grown powerful enough to be used by Facebook, among others, to filter disposable email addresses.

It’s a great example of how the power of masses and good will can be aggregated to create a useful tool.  Congratulations, Emre.